Why is Rear Window so tense?

Is this the best film ever made?

The central critical question about Rear Window is: what makes it so compelling? For the first part of the film, nothing happens. The murder only happens a quarter of the way into the film, and it is doubted for most of the duration. From the opening frame, behind the credits, we can see people moving around in their apartments, the little motions of ordinary life. The apartment building contains: a newly married couple, two women who sunbathe, a dancer, a lonely middle-aged woman, a conventional family with a young child, an amateur artist, a woman who keeps birds, a song-writer, a couple who sleep on their balcony and own a dog, and a married couple who row. Behind them all, the busy street passes by. Why is such a film compelling from the start? There is no hint that anything like a murder will take place.

First, this range of people is a trope in itself, akin to the country house setting of English murders. Each different type; each has their own problems: loneliness, professional struggle, marital stress, and so on. So from the start, as the camera pans through the rear window through which we see all this, we sense, intuitively, that we are watching these people for a reason. Hitchcock introduces them all with intense economy. When he makes his cameo, he is winding a clock, the perfect symbol of his work as director in this slow moving thriller.

And he does so with very few words. There are nicknames for them: Miss Torso, Miss Lonelyhearts, and so on. But we don’t need them. The images are enough. A silent, solo supper; a throng of unwanted admirers pressing themselves, literally, upon the dancer. So many of the most important and compelling passages of this film pass with no words spoken. When Thorwald first appears, he looks evil; we see it in his darkened eyes, his dipped head, the heavy gait. When he smokes a cigar in the dark, it is confirmed. This is a visual symbol of character. Quilp, the villain of The Old Curiosity Shop, does the same. But it is also a plot point. When the dog dies, only one person does not come to their window—Thorwald’s cigar can be seen glowing in the darkness.

From the beginning, Hitchcock shows us that we are in a mixed genre—it might be comic, it might be tragic; it might be something, it might be nothing; but somewhere, someone is going to be the victim. This is how a murder story begins. By showing us everyone in their tension with their neighbour—the amateur artist is annoyed by the dancer’s noise, the grumpy husband clearly dislikes the amateur artist, the newlyweds keep the blinds drawn, everyone can hear the songwriter’s music: all keep to themselves.

So we know this is a setting for drama. This is deeply reinforced when our protagonist is a photographer (essential for surveillance) who is wheelchair bound. Another hint is dropped when Thelma Ritter says she can feel there will be trouble with all the “peeping Tom” business Jimmy Stewart is doing. In a normal, generic, murder story, or private dick tale, this warning would be given more grimly, more loudly. The whole of Rear Window is a reaction to this genre. What we expect is made small; what we don’t expect is put centre frame.

When the wife is murdered we hear a small scream, but nothing can be seen. Instead of a panic, a chase, there is silence, the dark hint of something wicked, and the scene ends. When it rains, there is no dramatic thunder. When the husband confronts the wife, we hear nothing, we only see her mocking him. Every part of the traditional murder is made small, as it would be when seen from a window. Hitchcock is playing with the genre, showing us that the conventions can all be ignored and a fresh story told about how we see the world.

The window is the frame, and within that, the camera or binoculars. Jimmy Stewart moves from the panorama of his view to the close ups. As a photographer, he frames the world, chooses what to see and when. This is reinforced by the fact that he falls asleep and misses Thorwald leaving his apartment with a woman who could well be his wife. All we have to go on are deep suspicions. Unlike most murder mysteries, there is no body, and, until about two thirds of the way in, perhaps later, there isn’t even a guaranteed missing person. Hitchcock shows us enough to let us believe in the murder—but also enough to keep the doubter’s tension.

It is this that makes the film so compelling from beginning to end: are we seeing all that can be seen; are we seeing it clearly, accurately? Are we framing this mystery correctly? Thus Hitchcock makes a quiet melodrama, which is far more compelling than the lurid standard of his genre. More than once, real doubts are brought in about the whole movie. When the dog dies, his owner cries out to the whole building—all the dog did was love you all, is that why you killed him? Neighbours are supposed to love one another. When the policeman tells Stewart that private lives are almost impossible to understand through a window, we, and Stewart and Grace, feel the force of his argument. Several of the neighbours come close to calamity: a near suicide attempt, a drunken return where the composition is flung away, a dead dog. Miss Lonelyhearts is a lesson to them all that what they think they see is not necessarily what they ought to see.

It is not their spying that saves her life, but the songwriter’s music. Should they have watched her? Should we be watching them? Isn’t it alarming how readily Jimmy Stewart wants to disregard civil liberties to catch his suspect, based on such thin evidence? You must keep watching, the film says; only by sustained, close, all too intimate attention can the truth be found. Look how little expected are the endings of Miss Torso, the composer, and Miss Lonelyhearts—people we keep glancing at, but not intently watching.

This is the art of voyeurism. Something Hitchcock well understood, with his obsession for platinum blondes. Indeed, Grace Kelly’s hair, like a mass of gold spun into silk, occupies large parts of the frame in several scenes. Should you be watching her? After all, the camera lens and the window are all framed by the screen we’re staring at, are they not? When Grace Kelly is caught by Thorwald, we see him reflected in the window glass, just as we have seen so much reflected in Jimmy Stewart’s photo lens.

Another way Hitchcock resists his genre is the love story. Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart are not Sherlock and Watson—they combine the traditional “merry war” of comic lovers with the competition between sleuths. It is by becoming the daring Sherlock in her own right that this Beatrice wins her Bededick. It is not just private detective against police, or woman trying to pin down man, but a subtle marriage of the two story lines, making neither as clichéd as they otherwise would be.

Rear Window is one of the best movies ever made because it constantly presents all the tropes we expect in a murder story, but never uses them in the conventional manner. It becomes a commentary on the voyeuristic nature of art, which is not a mirror to nature, but the opportunity to spy through windows we would shrink from staring at in real life.